Mortgage free in Forever Home :-)

Cheery_Daff

Excellent goals,  and gardening is definitely psychological for me too 🙄😂

KajiKita

Cheery_Daff said:

Excellent goals,  and gardening is definitely psychological for me too 🙄😂

Thank you. I see you as great ‘doer’, so if you struggle with this I feel less useless 😊❤️

KK

Cheery_Daff

KajiKita said:

Cheery_Daff said:

Excellent goals,  and gardening is definitely psychological for me too 🙄😂

Thank you. I see you as great ‘doer’, so if you struggle with this I feel less useless 😊❤️

KK

Crikey 😮 I see YOU as a doer 😂😂 Just goes to show how our perception of other people, especially when we only see them through what they post online, can be a bit warped, and not particularly helpful to compare ourselves to! We compare our own insides to other people's outsides, as they say...

Gardening is definitely psychological for me, as is housework, and most other things 😂 I have a great sense that I SHOULD be productive, have a beautiful garden, welcoming home, that I SHOULD be able to keep on top of the housework, the mowing, taking the compost out, growing a beautiful and productive veg patch, keeping myself beautiful and well maintained, eating healthily, always being available for social occasions, tending to the needs of husband and family, as well as working almost full time....

So you can see why I often write overambitious lists, and why I am usually dissatisfied with whatever I get done, even if by anyone's standards it's a fair bit 🙄

Gardening is an interesting one. It's visible of course, and I know a fair few gardeners, although more of the productive/food growing/wildlife variety rather than rose-pruning types. So when I don't sow seeds on time, or let them die, or don't get them out of the greenhouse before July and they don't have time to grow, I have a great sense of failure 🙄 Added to that this garden is really just too big to be maintained by just me with the amount of time I have (especially considering I'm trying to scythe a one acre hay field each year too), and the grass just grows and grows and GROWS until I feel like it's up round my eyeballs and eating me alive 😮 Sometimes just looking out if the window is painful 🙄 it's taken me 5 years to admit that it's really just too big for me alone to keep it like I'd like it to be kept, and I've still not settled on what to do about that.

So in summary, I am forever battling against a giant pile of SHOULDS, in relation to the garden, house, professional life, exercise and diet, family, etc etc, that sometimes just paralyse me.

I'm capable of being pretty active, have a tendency towards aiming for over-achieveiness,  and Mr Cheery often describes me as one of the most organised and productive people he's ever known 🙄 but in reality i never get as much done as I want to, which I think is the case for many people. I suspect most of my 'problems' would be solved completely if I just lowered my standards and expectations of myself (I should point out these expectations DO only ever apply to myself, not to anyone else!)

So all that waffle to say, plant a few seeds and shout hooray, and ignore the rest 😂

Cheery_Daff

Oh, and having been back and read your post - the point I often give in is May/June ish. Before that, it's exciting being in the greenhouse after the winter, and often too cold to be actually outside. Once May arrives, the grass starts growing, there's a busy patch at work, and I stop going to the greenhouse as much... it's not quite warm enough to plant out, but it FEELS warm, so things get ignored, then they shrivel up, or I've planted too many seeds and it's overwhelming, so stuff doesn't make it out if the greenhouse, or if it does, it gets strangled with weeds. I've not had much of a harvest of anything since we moved here, and I've literally got acres of space 😱

KajiKita

Oh @Cheery_Daff, bless you, you are living inside my head I think! 😉😊 I find it’s generally May when I am defeated by the tsunami of weeds … 🙄😳

Tell you what, let’s make a pact this year, along the lines of:

- we are allowed to take shortcuts and prioritise what matters to us (I haven’t got the energy to end the veggie patch AND the ornamental bcs so <ahem> have ordered 11 bags of sterile, fertile mulch to cover the ornamental beds with on the grounds that will help me keep on top of them and the veggie beds are so weedy it won’t make much difference! 😂) 

- we celebrate any and all gardening ‘wins’ whether actions or actual results ❤️🤩

KK

Cheery_Daff

KajiKita said:

Oh @Cheery_Daff, bless you, you are living inside my head I think! 😉😊 I find it’s generally May when I am defeated by the tsunami of weeds … 🙄😳

Tell you what, let’s make a pact this year, along the lines of:

- we are allowed to take shortcuts and prioritise what matters to us (I haven’t got the energy to end the veggie patch AND the ornamental bcs so <ahem> have ordered 11 bags of sterile, fertile mulch to cover the ornamental beds with on the grounds that will help me keep on top of them and the veggie beds are so weedy it won’t make much difference! 😂) 

- we celebrate any and all gardening ‘wins’ whether actions or actual results ❤️🤩

KK

Yes!! I am definitely up for that 😁 I confess I've decided if I get my new job I'll definitely be paying someone to mow the grass so I can get on with something more interesting 😂😂

beanielou

Great decision

KajiKita

@Cheery_Daff, I’m glad to hear that …. The scything, whilst very good exercise is also very time consuming….

I’m seriously considering getting a gardener to come in once a week for a few hours to beat back the veggie patch ….

KK

LadyWithAPlan

Suddenly now I am not feeling as big a desire for a garden... it seems a lot of work..

'Shoulds' just drain joy out of ones life.

Cheery_Daff

Ha, LaPlan, don't be put off by me complaining about the garden - we've got 11 acres 😂 Most of that is grass/cows, the actual garden is probably a third of an acre or so - at any rate, you're not likely to get close to that in London 😂 Our old garden was about 100 square feet, a little concrete path and beds round two sides of the house next to the pavement. I could weed and tidy the entire thing in a couple of hours and spend the rest of the day having a nice sit down reading a book 😂